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Send Email Reminders About Shared Notebooks

Sharing notebooks is a great way to work together with your friends, colleagues and classmates. We’ve added a reminder email feature that addresses two needs. First, it allows you to easily alert people to changes in your notebook. Second, it’s a useful way to resend a notebook sharing invitation, if the recipients missed the first one. Here’s how it works.

Sending a reminder

To do this, go to the Manage Sharing screen in the Mac, Windows and Web versions of Evernote, then click on a notebook that you’ve shared with individuals. You’ll notice a new link labelled “Send Reminder.” Clicking this link brings up a popup with a list of all the individuals that you’ve invited to view or edit the notebook. You can either send a reminder note to everyone or to specific people.

Don’t forget, if you’re a Premium user, you can allow others to edit notes in your notebooks.

Your “Send reminder” feature only shows on the person that started the shared folder. What about the shared people? I do not see a “Send reminder” when I add something to a shared notebook. I wife and I have a shared notebook. She created it on her Evernote account and has shared it with me. We both add notes to the shared notebook. I want to be able to let her know when I have added something new to the shared notebook. That is my goal. How can I do this?

Thanks for the suggestions. A good example of how the reminder feature can be used is in an environment where a single notebooks is accessed by many people. For example, imagine a business that places important HR documents into a shared notebook. With the reminder feature, the owner of the notebook could quickly notify all employees that there’s an update to a benefits document.

True – but most users are looking for a way to send a “automated” reminder to all users that are sharing the notebook regardless of who made the edit.

Today’s blogs, forums etc all have this feature as standard – and I’d say it’s a crucial part of any shared noteboook/forum/collection (whatever you wish to call it) experience.

Without auto-reminders via email, I’m going to miss things – because as a consumer of the shared notebook I am literally forced to check for changes, and obviously as it’s implemented at this point in Evernote – the person sharing the notebook is forced to click on a button to send out the email.

What I would use (at the drop of a hat), is something that allows:
– any change in the notebook to cause an email notification to be sent (make this optional, not all changes need notifications)
– any change by anyone who can modify the notebook should cause this, NOT just the owner of the notebook

Then Evernote is left only with the problem of “how to send the emails”, maybe you guys are not so hot on the idea of running your own SMTP system to handle this, but that’d be awesome.

Otherwise you’d have to build in local capability to send such an email from each device (which I’ll assume is a ton of work given the number of devices that you support).

Why not let Evernote check for changes in shared (by you and to you) notebooks made by others than yourself? And accordingly:
1. Mark the changed notebook(s) found, like in a mail app;
2. Mark the changed note(s);
3. Mark the changes in the note, possibly even accompanied with “changed by “.

Evernote already knows whether there are changes because if so, it syncs that notebook. The tricky part may well be to distinguish between changes made by you and made by others. If it is on the same device that you made the change, then there is only a sync of the Evernote server needed. Not of the client, which is you. When you open Evernote on another device, that notebook must be synced. And you don’t want to get a message that alerts you of a change made by yourself. So, the changer needs to be coupled with the change.
That is not such a bad idea if you’re going to annotate changes with the changers’ email.

When finally all this notification service idea has crystalized out and is implemented I am not sure whether I want email reminders of changes in Evernote shared notebooks in my mailbox. I’d rather keep it inside Evernote. Why? Because I spend more time in Evernote than in my mailclient. In such a case an email reminder becomes superfluous.
Maybe keep email reminders as optional?